Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

No sooner had he left again than Martha took the berries and put them alternately in Helene’s mouth and her own. They fell on the grass and looked up at the clouds. The wind had died down around them and now carried only a faint scent of wood from the sawmill. Helene breathed in the aroma, mingled with the sweet perfume of some kind of flowers. Martha saw the shape of a hussar in the sky; his horse had only forelegs and even those disappeared if you watched for any length of time. While there seemed to be almost no wind down here, the clouds up above were driving eastwards faster and faster. Helene said she could see a dragon, but Martha said dragons have wings.

No wonder everyone’s talking about mobilization, Arthur called down to them. Seeing you two lying there like that, I don’t feel as if picking berries were difficult!

The sisters exchanged meaningful glances. Arthur’s main interest was in being close to them, they were sure, not in mobilization. Neither of them had any idea, in fact, what he meant by that word. They suspected that his notion of the term was as vague as their own. They heard the wind whistling fitfully up above, whistling a cheerful march. Who was going to war, and what for? Was there a more beautiful place anywhere than the banks of the Spree? And for months the warmth of the sun had inspired such confidence! The holidays would never end; no one would follow the call to mobilization.

That’s all there are, said Arthur when he came back some time later with two handfuls of wild strawberries and sat down in front of the sisters. Would you like them? He reached out his hands to Martha; the berries were rolling about and threatened to fall into the grass.

No, I don’t want any more.

Would you like some?

Helene shook her head. For a moment Arthur looked at his hands, undecided.

Darling, he begged Martha, laughing. They’re for you.

Never mind that, let’s feed the little angel.

Martha held up her hands and took the strawberries from Arthur. Some of them fell on the grass.

Grab her. Martha indicated Helene with a nod of her head. Arthur did as she said, flung himself on Helene, forced her down under him and knelt on her small body, his strong hands pressing her arms to the ground. While Arthur and Martha laughed, Helene struggled, clenched her fists, shouted to Arthur to let her go. She tried arching her spine to throw him off, but he was heavy, he laughed, he was so heavy that her back gave way under the strain. Now Martha forced berry after berry between Helene’s lips as she pressed them together as firmly as possible. Juice was running out of the corners of her mouth and down her chin and throat. Jaws clenched, Helene tried begging them to leave her alone. Now Martha stuffed the little berries up Helene’s nose so that she could hardly breathe and the juice stung the inside of her nostrils. Martha squashed the berries on Helene’s mouth, on her teeth, squeezed them so that the skin around Helene’s mouth was itching from the sweet juice of the berries, until she opened her mouth and not only did she lick the strawberries off her teeth, she licked Martha’s fingers too when her sister pushed them into her mouth.

That tickles. Martha laughed. It feels like, like… feel for yourself.

Helene could already feel Arthur’s fingers in her mouth. She didn’t stop to think, she simply bit. Arthur screeched and jumped up.

He had run some way off.

Are you crazy? Martha had looked at Helene in horror. It was only a bit of fun.

And now, feeling Martha’s tongue in her mouth, Helene wondered whether to bite that too. But she couldn’t, there was something she liked about Martha’s tongue, although at the same time she felt ashamed.

Martha shook her awake. It was still dark and Martha was holding a candle. Apparently the girls were to follow their father into the next room. Mother lay there on the bed, rigid. Her eyes were dull, with no light in them. Helene tried to see a gleam of some kind there, she propped her hands on the bed and bent over her mother, but Mother’s eyes never moved.

I’m dying, said Mother quietly.

Father said nothing; he looked grave. He was nervously fingering the pommel of his curved sword. He didn’t want to waste any more time talking about the point of the war and his part in it. He had been expected at the barracks on the outskirts of town since last week and the regiment wouldn’t put up with further delay. His departure could not be postponed or evaded. It was no surprise to Ernst Ludwig Würsich to hear that his wife would rather die than say goodbye. She had frequently toyed with the idea before, had said so, in tones both loud and soft, to herself and to others. Every child she had lost after the birth of Martha had seemed to her a demand for her life to end. The pendulum of the clock on the wall shattered time into small, countable units.

Carefully, Helene approached Mother’s hand. She was going to kiss it. The hand moved and was withdrawn. Helene leaned over her mother’s face. But Mother moved her head aside without giving her daughter one of her usual strange looks. Her four dead children would have been boys. One by one they had died, two still in the uterus, the other two just after birth. They had all had black hair when they were born, thick, long black hair, and dark skin that was almost blue. The fourth son had been breathing noisily on the morning of his birth, breathing with difficulty, he seemed to take a deep breath and then all was still. As if the breath couldn’t leave his little body any more. Yet he was smiling, and newborn babies don’t usually smile. His mother had called the dead child Ernst Josef; she had taken the baby’s body in her arms and wouldn’t let him go for days. He lay in her arms, in bed with her, and when she had to visit the smallest room in the house she took him with her. Later, Mariechen had told Martha and Helene how their father had asked her to make sure that everything was all right, and how she had gone into the bedroom where Mother sat on the edge of the bed with her hair down, cradling her dead baby. Only after days was she heard praying; it was a relief. Mother had recited a long Kaddish for Ernst Josef, although there was no one to say amen, no one to join her in mourning. Father and Mariechen were worried about her, and neither of them wept for the dead child. Whenever anyone spoke to Mother over the next few days, said something to her or asked a question, her voice rose, murmuring words as if she were constantly talking to herself, and the murmuring died down quietly to inaudibility only in the hours when no one spoke to her. Even now she was heard praying every day. The strange sounds coming out of Mother’s mouth sounded like an invented language. Helene couldn’t imagine that Mother knew what she was saying. There was something both all-inclusive and exclusive about them; to Helene’s ear they had no meaning at all, yet they screened the house from the world, rested on it like a silence full of sound.

When Mariechen opened the curtains in the morning Mother closed them again. After that there were only one or two months in the year when Mother woke from her darkness, and then she remembered that she had a living child, a little girl called Martha, and she was ready to play with her in silly ways as if she were a child herself. It was Easter, so Mother thought she would roll eggs down the Protschenberg. She seemed to be in high spirits, she was wearing one of her feather-trimmed hats. She threw it up in the air like a discus and let herself drop in the grass, she rolled over the meadow and downhill, and lay there at the bottom of the slope. Martha ran after her. Ladies and gentlemen with sunshades watched from a safe distance; no longer surprised by the foreign woman’s behaviour, they shook their heads disapprovingly and turned away. Their eggs must seem to them more important than the woman who had just rolled down the hill. Martha’s father had followed his wife and daughter; he bent over his wife and offered her a hand to help her up. Martha, then eight years old, held her mother’s other hand. Mother uttered a throaty laugh, she said she liked his God better than hers, but both of them were just the same, merely the shared imaginary creation of a few deluded people, human worms who for hundreds and thousands of years had spent a large part of their lives brooding over some plausible reason for their existence. A strange, a ridiculous characteristic of living beings.